Staging Tips That Will Transform Your Website
As a real estate professional, you may be closely familiar with the importance of home staging and how it can become an essential skill when presenting a new home on the market. Staging a home can bring out the very best aspects of a space and can help your audience visualize the actual lifestyle they will be living. You wouldn’t just show a property or hold an open house without first taking extra steps to ensure your clients will have an amazing first impression, right?
As with home staging, the same concept also applies to website design and how you market yourself, your listings and your services online. Presenting your best foot forward through your website is hardly different from the principles of home staging because you are likewise curating a set of visuals to communicate a positive feeling, and create a palpable emotional response.
Although your website lives on a two-dimensional platform, that does not mean you have less opportunities to wield your creative skills and exercise your staging abilities. You actually have more freedom and creative license because you are using a digital canvas to wow your prospective clients and present something truly well designed.
To dive in, here are several amazing design ideas that will transform your website and have you staging it like a pro:
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Maximize Visual Impact With Stunning Photography
Imagery is a very powerful tool, especially in real estate web design and marketing. Hook potential clients by greeting them will only your best full-screen and high resolution photos. You’ll want to select the most impactful shots that showcase the beauty of your focus areas and highlight the best assets of the listings you carry. Shine the spotlight on your active featured properties or even present some of your best solds.
For your website’s main banner photo, you really want to narrow down your photo selection to the ones that quintessentially capture the vision and goals of your audience. You can line up a handful of photos to display in a slideshow, featuring a mix of exemplary home exterior and interiors, a glimpse of the neighborhood, or interesting architectural angles and details.
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Paint A Picture Of The Local Scene
Another way to impress and entice clients is to give them a thematic presentation that mimics the vibe of the neighborhoods you specialize in. Whether it’s centered on a corporate and cosmopolitan vibe, or a cozy and rustic approach, being able to faithfully represent the pace and charm of the area is a subtle but effective way to create a connection with your audience.
Highlighting the ambience of the local scene can be done through design choices, such as color, texture and decorative accents. It can also be done through photography pieces that make a statement. Aerial photos for example, can lend tons of visual appeal and give home buyers and real estate investors a glimpse of what’s in store for them in a specific market.
If you serve markets in visually stunning locations, such as mountain communities and seaside enclaves, giving your website visitors a drone video shot of the region can definitely work to your advantage. Besides, who wouldn’t want to show off such gorgeous locales?
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Use Color As a Communication Tool
Colors are a great addition to any real estate website, whether you’re going for a minimalist template or a maximalist design. It can also help you convey something about your brand and the real estate market you serve.
For instance, if you’re a real estate agent in the Bahamas, incorporating bright, summery colors that evoke the atmosphere of the Caribbean will help you transport potential clients to the islands. Meanwhile, subdued browns and forest greens can be part of your color scheme if you specialize in mountain cabins.
If you want a predominantly black-and-white design but don’t want a boring look, you can always select a nice hue to use as your accent color. It will add that nice pop, enough to liven up your modern, minimalist theme and provide the contrast you need for featuring important calls-to-action.
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Evoke A Warm and Inviting Feeling
Since you are in the business of buying and selling homes, bringing a personal touch to your website will make you relatable and warm to prospective clients. You can do this with a sprinkling of photos that depict anything from a happy family in a home, to a picture of you and your team in your office, behind the scenes.
You can stage your website to trigger pleasant feelings of belonging, satisfaction, community, and depending on your audience, sophisticated luxury or calm and relaxation. Apart from images, the way you caption and phrase your statements can serve as your way of welcoming your clients into your world. Be selective with the words you use to describe your properties, your team and the areas you feature.
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Dial In The Details
Once you’ve built a collection of design elements on your website, a commonly missed step in staging is fine-tuning the details, which can sometimes spell the difference between a good or bad impression.
A good example of this involves minor photo editing to enhance your image quality. After selecting your photos, it’s worth spending some time to calibrate the lighting, color and image quality. This goes beyond the typical work of a photographer and may need an eye for marketing and psychology to see what excites the senses. Sometimes a matter of cropping images in the right places can make a remarkable difference, helping users to focus on one thing or another.
Another example of attention to detail is by carefully proofreading all of your content. This practice is not at all new, and you’d consider it common knowledge, but it is surprisingly overlooked by many in the industry. Don’t wait for an off-putting typo error to put you in a bad light.
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Just Keep It Simple
To make your real estate website’s content easy to understand and take in, you don’t want to go overboard with design elements. Simplicity is beauty, and in web design, that old adage can also be applied.
If you are using a full-screen photos, you may want to spare your background of other images—a nice, solid color would do the trick. Furthermore, don’t overload your homepage with too many photos, which could backfire by slowing down your website’s overall loading time.
Take a step back and review your website for visually “heavy” sections. See what can be eliminated in order to focus on your true message. Strive for balance with your chosen design elements to achieve a real estate website that is beautiful and a delight to the senses.
Though you have all of these design tips at your disposal, there’s no escaping the fact that staging your website can be a skill that takes time, practice and some trial and error. The more you immerse your audience in your website’s online environment, the sooner you can gather the feedback and results you need to keep honing your craft.
Looking for more staging tips, or trying to get the eye of a couple design experts on your website? Contact us at 1.800.979.5799 or send a message here. Our seasoned designers at Agent Image can help you transform your website into the best version it can be.
